How to Ice a Glass with Flair

Learn how to ice a glass with flair from mixologist / flair bartender Chris Cardone in this Howcast video.

Transcript

Hi. I'm Chris Cardone from the Flair Bartender's Association, and I'm going to teach you how to flair with ice.

So we have a glass that we need to fill up with ice. But we don't want to just take an ice scoop, scoop the ice, and put it in, although that can certainly work. We want to do a little bit more for the guest. So what I generally think is you want to start off with an empty glass with no ice in there, and do one little ice cube move, and then finish it by scooping the ice into the glass. Reason being is, if you have a glass full of ice, it's harder to catch the ice in the glass when it's full than when it's empty. I guess that's a whole philosophical discussion though.

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What we're going to do is, we're going to take our ice with our tongs, because we don't want to use our fingers in someone's ice. We're going to throw it behind our back, and catch it in our drink, and then we'll ice up the rest of the drink. And then we'll make our cocktail. But the concept is very very simple.

We're going to take our scoop, or in this case, our tongs with our ice. We're going to bring it around behind our back. We're going to release it right by our opposite butt cheek, and we're going to throw it up in the air and catch it into the glass. Ice is a really cool way to start things because customers just are not expecting to see ice going flying in the air. You certainly could just throw it in the air from just in front of you, but it blends a little bit more excitement if it goes behind your back.

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So one last time. We throw it up. Catch it in our drink. Put it down. And we make our drink inside our glass or our tin, for that matter.

Another way to do a little bit of ice flair is to take our ice scoop, or our tongs. We take our ice and we can capture our ice by throwing it in the air, and taking it like that. And now we have ice in the tin to make our drink into there before we make our cocktails.

So you can ice your glass. You can ice your tin. But you can certainly use ice to increase the guest experience as well.